2018/2019 Portland Arts & Lectures Season

In addition to live events that are later broadcast through The Archive Project on OPB radio and iTunes, the program connects renowned authors with readers and writers of all ages through classroom visits and writing workshops.

The 34th season of Portland Arts & Lectures features some of the most engaging writers at work today. They are novelists, essayists, and journalists whose award-winning works covers the most compelling issues of our time.

Series subscriptions start at just $90, and include five memorable evenings with some of the most inspiring authors at work today. This series sell quickly.

Jill LeporeThursday, October 11, 2018 at 7:30 p.m.

Jill Lepore is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include the New York Times best seller The Secret History of Wonder Woman; Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; and, forthcoming in September 2018, These Truths: A History of the United States. The Washington Post wrote that Lepore, “has established herself as perhaps the most prolific, nimble, and interesting writer of American history today, vigorously kicking at the past until she dislodges it from the ossifying grip of received wisdom.” Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University where she teaches courses in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history.

Tara WestoverTuesday, December 4, 2018 at 7:30 p.m.

Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Her first book is Educated: A Memoir, a #1 New York Times bestseller, which USA Today praised as “living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable… a heartbreaking, heartwarming, best-in-years memoir about striding beyond the limitations of birth and environment into a better life.”

Tayari JonesThursday, January 17, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.

Tayari Jones is the author of An American Marriage, a 2018 Oprah’s Book Club selection; Leaving Atlanta; The Untelling; and Silver Sparrow. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, the New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, an United States Artist Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Michael Chabon said: “Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear.”

Jennifer EganThursday, February 21, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.

Jennifer Egan is the author of Manhattan Beach, the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Of her writing, George Saunders has said: “To see the world through Egan’s eyes is to be moved, through language, to new adoration of the world. I don’t know a better writer working today. There is a generosity in her prose that is vastly enlivening to its reader and brings about that beautiful effect fiction sometimes causes: more, and better-grounded, fondness for reality, just as it is.”

Jacqueline WoodsonThursday, April 4, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.

Jacqueline Woodson is a 2014 National Book Award winner for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming. Her most recent work is the New York Times bestselling novel Another Brooklyn, which was a 2016 National Book Award finalist and Woodson’s first adult novel in twenty years. Of it, the Washington Post said: “Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. Another Brooklyn is another name for poetry.” In 2015, Woodson was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, an NAACP Image Award recipient, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner.

Latest Blog Posts

On October 4, Jane Smiley gave the first lecture of the 2015/2016 season of Portland Arts & Lectures. When Smiley took the stage, she opened up to the audience with ease and framed her lecture around the connections between politics…

Hello! My name is Kelsey Camacho, and I’m currently one of the interns working on the Literary Arts Archive Project. I was born and raised in North Carolina, where I attended Elon University. I graduated in May 2014 and received…

[by Mel Wells] During her week as Literary Art’s author-in-residence, Ruth Ozeki is spending several hours at Grant High School visiting students in their classes and discussing her work, both as a filmmaker and a novelist. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Ozeki visited…